‘Space Is The Great Equalizer’: General Jay Raymond Discusses Commercial Space, Geopolitics at Jackson School Event

On Monday, General Jay Raymond (ret.), the first Chief of Space Operations of the U.S. Space Force, spoke at Yale’s Jackson School of Global Affairs as a guest of the Schmidt Program’s Outer Space Symposium. The symposium is a speaker series based on a Jackson School course, Global Affairs 280: The Space Domain and Global Security, a class co-taught by Senior Lecturer in Global Affairs Edward Wittenstein and Colonel Lester Oberg of Yale’s AFROTC Detachment 009. 

Raymond spent most of his military career in the Air Force, serving as a missile and space officer and taking command assignments at the Air Force Space Command and the U.S. Space Command. In 2019, after the founding of the Space Force, Raymond was appointed Chief of Space Operations, a role he held until 2022.

In a conversation with Wittenstein, Raymond began by discussing the changing role of space in military conflicts. Although many consider Operation Desert Storm as the first war where space capabilities were used for military operations, Raymond argued that the first space war was actually the Cold War. He also highlighted China’s 2007 decision to test an anti-satellite missile by shooting down one of their own satellites, which represented significant progress toward the militarization of space. According to Raymond, this test was a wake-up call for the U.S.    

Raymond discussed how slow and steady progress was made toward the establishment of the Space Force beginning in the 1990s. Ultimately the National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 established the Space Force as a separate branch of the military.

The success of the U.S. commercial space industry has been a boon for the Space Force. Launch services provided by companies such as Elon Musk’s SpaceX and Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin have greatly enhanced the Space Force’s capability to deploy satellites. Additionally, SpaceX’s Starlink satellites have provided critical internet access for Ukrainian forces in the Russo-Ukrainian War, which Raymond labeled as the “first commercial space war.” Despite the thriving interdependence of U.S. commercial and military space, he said that challenges remain, as commercial and military space “speak different languages.”   

Raymond identified China as the greatest space threat to the United States. 

“What concerns me most is not their capabilities but how fast they are advancing,” Raymond said. 

China has progressed swiftly since the establishment of the Chinese National Space Administration (CNSA) in 1993 and is now a near-peer space competitor of the U.S. To counter China’s rapid development, “partnership with commercial space is critical.”

Although lesser than that of China, the Russian space threat remains, according to Raymond. In December 2019, Russia performed a “nesting doll” operation in space, where a previously hidden satellite emerged from within a larger satellite; the smaller satellite came close to a U.S. satellite.

Raymond argued that one of the greatest internal challenges for the Space Force is the misuse of information classification rules. He said that space is “over classified” because people “don’t understand the classification rules” and “classify info because it’s the easy button.” As a result, Americans don’t talk about space enough.

Looking to the future, Raymond called for the proliferation of commercially-built Space Force satellites to increase “resilience,” or the ability to maintain space operations even if one or more satellites are shot down. He also urged the space community to normalize how it handles information classification and for the US to “partner very broadly” with other countries. He encouraged the US to allocate a greater share of its federal budget to the Space Force, as space is a “huge force multiplier” in conflicts. 

Raymond concluded by advising those in attendance to “not forget about service” as they pursue various careers.